Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit

Some women, too, I discover during my lunch with Solnit at a small neighbourhood bistro - Chez Maman East - in the low-key San Francisco neighbourhood of Potrero Hill. “Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they are talking about,” she wrote in the follow-up bestseller, offering up a small softener: “Some men.” It’s the piece that brought us “mansplaining”, a phrase she coined after the host of a fancy party in Aspen tried to explain a “very important” new book about 19th-century photography to her - without giving her enough conversational airtime to explain that she was, in fact, the book’s author. But in this age of gender polarisation and short attention spans, it’s perhaps no surprise that her breakthrough work was a snack-sized essay titled “Men Explain Things to Me”. Not a fan.Activist, journalist, writer, authority on everything from empathy to the history of walking - Rebecca Solnit is something of a Renaissance woman. Using a trendy title to capture readers/listeners to buy a series of mostly pointless essays often off the topic of feminism entirely is duplicitous. I'm a 60 year old life-long feminist and proud of that title, but this book is as trite as the come. I could see series of SNL skits for most of itĭon't get me wrong. When she mispronounced the name of great feminists it was clear she was unfamiliar with the topic.Ĭould you see Men Explain Things to Me being made into a movie or a TV series? Who should the stars be? Came off as someone reading a script rather than really grasping the contents. She sounded like Siri or a young girl trying to be very serious. What didn’t you like about Luci Christian Bell’s performance? The use of 'women's work' topics like hanging the laundry was more suited to a Lifetime movie. After that it went off the rails, morphing into blank verse type attempt at figurative literature and failed.

The prologue and the first chapter or two.

What was the most compelling aspect of this narrative? I was expecting a book about why men mansplain, not a series of dated essays about whatever seemed to be on the author's mind at the time. Maybe, if the title wasn't as misleading as this one was. Would you try another book from Rebecca Solnit and/or Luci Christian Bell?

Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit